Initial particle placement

#1

It’s been a long time since using Particle flow and my knowledge was minimal at best so bear with me.

What i’m trying to accomplish is to have a wall of words that would start in formation and then break up into a vortex. I haven’t found much for direct resources online, but i did find a tutorial I could repurpose. here

Essentially Particle flow is using a shape instance of my letters, which are all broken apart and the grouped. The problem is that if I separate particles by group members then all of the letters will move to the same point.

Does anyone know where I can look to get more information on setting the initial placement of particles, or is there a different workflow I should be looking into.


#2

I guess the pivot point must be the same for all the letters, as in using the group pivot point. U should center the pivot point to each individual letter. That should do the trick.

#3

that was my original thought, but If I ungroup the object and center the pivot point to the object, and then regroup, the problem seems to persist.

#4

This is sweet, I’m pretty new to pFlow as well and this piqued my curiosity. =)

If you don’t mind, I don’t really understand the problem you’re having. Are you trying to have the words stay intact as they form into the vortex, or have the letters all fly separately?

#5

I want the letters to fly away seperately after a couple seconds. I’ve done some searching online and discovered a Birth Script written by Bobo which was used to handle fragments in explosions. here

I figured I could repurpose that and in one sense it worked, the initial placement seems correct, but the problem now is that if I scrub the timeline the particles dissapear. I have to click edit script and then close the dialog. Also they don’t seem to render.

It seems I’m missing something altogether though because it seems like there is a way to make sure that the particles start in a certain position. I thought that maybe position object would help, but i haven’t really seemed to figure that one out.

Edit: I rebuilt the scene and using the script appears to work now. Don’t know why it didn’t in the other scene but I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

#6

Try adding a cache operator to the global node. It should alleviate the problem.

#7

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